Dirk: Wake Up
by Sylindara
Summary: Dirk's awakening on Derse.


_Open your eyes, Dirk._

You open your eyes. You are in your bed, blankets twisted around you from your restless sleep. From your right, light filters in from an open window and you can hear the waves crashing against the steel girders of your apartment tower.

_Now open them again._

You open your eyes. You are in your bed, blankets twisted around you from your restless sleep. But everything around you is painted a spectacularly vibrant and obnoxious shade of red, and it is completely dark outside of a window that is most definitely not the shape it's supposed to be in.

Startled, you sit up in a rush; except that can't be right because you are still lying down in your bed. It is a weird feeling, looking around at the bright red surroundings while at the same time staring up into a white ceiling that you've known all your life.

Gingerly, as an experiment, you move off the bed. You pause suddenly as you do so, as the movement reveals that you are now sporting a pair of strangely familiar purple pyjamas. You take a moment to wonder how freaked out you should be feeling, that you are no longer wearing the clothes you went to bed in; even if, in a sense, you still are. But compared to the fact that you are still lying down in your bed staring up at the ceiling while simultaneously standing beside your bed…it's probably the least of your worries.

You continue exploring the room, both rooms, noting the similarities and the differences. Overall, most of your possessions seem to have duplicated, the glaring difference being that one set is now coloured completely red. You have feeling this is going to be a theme.

At least you're lucky that your body doesn't seem to have followed the colour palette; you skin is still the same shade it has always been, and the rest of your body is just the same too – besides the new duds. Even the glasses on your face.

Your eyes soon land on the one thing in the room that isn't red, Lil' Cal in his usual outfit that you realise you now match. You cannot describe the sense of relief that overcomes you knowing that your best and dearest companion is here with you, in both rooms. Suddenly, you feel – no, you know you'll be fine.

We're doing this, man. We're making this happen.

You flashstep up to Lil' Cal – both of them – and give them the most righteous of brofists. Because that's what you do when you engage in Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff references; but also to bolster your self-confidence.

The new position affords you a closer view outside the window, and you realise abruptly that you have no idea where you are. You pride yourself on your knowledge of Earth, how it is now and how it was before; and you have no idea what this place is. The tall gothic buildings interlaced with spindly bridges and walkways, the graceful spiralling arches everywhere, the just as obnoxious shade of purple colouring everything and matching your – rather snazzy now that you're over the shock of having been forcibly changed without noticing it – pyjamas, you are willing to bet on your pride as a historian that we are definitely not in Texas anymore, Lil' Cal.

Or, well, not completely, you're still seeing the normal, unending stretch of sea that surrounds your apartment tower of course. But you are getting used to the fact that you are kind of in two places at once by now. Although you are trying not to think too hard how your brain is managing these dual sensory inputs. Presumably if you have two bodies working at the same time, then you also have two brains working at the same time; the question is: how are they syncing up?

You put that line of thought away for now. There will be time for experiments later, but right now you need to scope out the place and find out what's going on. You lean out the window as far as you can, making sure to only lean out of the one that looks out to the purple city. You keep your hands clenched on the windowsill that is facing the ocean, both to keep you grounded and to remind yourself not to get too close; you don't have much confidence in your swimming skills yet, and none in your falling from a lofty height into a body of water without dying skills. All this switching around sure is confusing!

All this switching around is also not good for your concentration, or at least thinking too much about it isn't very good because you accidently lean too far out. You screw eyes shut as you prepare for the fall, and make a note to yourself to practice controlling both bodies a bit more in a controlled environment before you try this again.

Except you don't fall, and when you open your eyes you find yourself floating in the space right outside your window. And it truly is space here, the heavy blackness of it pressing in all around; no matter how far you crane your neck, there is no sky above you. You wonder if there is no gravity here which is why you can float, though that doesn't explain the buildings or how you're breathing right now. You are trying not to think about how you are simultaneously looking out the window into the sea and floating outside the window and looking into your room.

If you had thought the whole split consciousness was weird before, now it's downright uncanny as you fly a bit higher into the not-sky while also standing in one place. The outside of the room is just as strange as everything else, fitting in with the aesthetic of this place as a tall tower with a smooth round ball on top. You gently nudge yourself away from the windowsill to start your daily ablutions. You are so used to your morning routine now that you are fairly confident you can go through it without conscious thought, allowing you to concentrate on flying yourself out into the purple city and mapping out the surroundings.

Below you, you can see a few small black creatures scuttling around, and you make sure to keep out of their sight. Better to not get spotted this early in the game when you don't know if they're friend or foe. Just because nothing's happened to you while you were in the giant ball tower doesn't mean anything. You briefly contemplate the theory that you were locked up in there, but considering your flying abilities and the lack of locks or even glass in the windows, you conclude that you are no Rapunzel after all no need to worry about messing with your impeccably rad hairstyle. But you do make sure to stay unseen just in case.

High above the city, enough so that you feel confident that those on the ground won't notice you, you look around and notice another tower just like yours a bit further away, the only other one you can see. Intrigued, you fly out and peek in the window.

The shock of what you see inside makes you falter and almost fall out of the sky. Inside your apartment, you drop your towel in surprise, and outside the tower your hands lock onto the windowsill as you see, for the first time in your life, another human being.

You greedily drink in the sight, noting the pale hair, the calm face smooth in repose, the relaxed body deeply asleep. You wonder for a moment who they are, before it hits you. It's tipsyGnostalgic! It's _Roxy_. Right here in front of you! You almost climb in the window, to wake her up so she can join your exploration, before you realise what it means that you can see Roxy here.

Suddenly, you don't want to deal with this. Abruptly, you wrench yourself away from the window and fly out even further up above the towers. You can take care of the Roxy issue later, there's still more exploring to do you tell yourself.

Now that you're up so high, you can see the whole of the purple city with its two towers laid out before you. Especially the fact that it's apparently a 2D pentagram; perhaps they had to make budget cuts when making this part of the set you think sardonically. You would wonder about the physics of it all, but you've already decided that the laws of physics can't be working considering what you're doing right now. What is more interesting though, is the chain that is connecting the little pentagram with your towers to a much larger pentagram in the same shade of purple. There are no towers on this larger pentagram though, so you can at least be sure that the only humans here are you and Roxy. Paradoxically, you are actually kind of soothed by that, you don't think you can manage too many people all up in this place considering your childhood.

Looking far into the distance, beyond the two pentagrams, you can just make out a blue light shining faintly. Beside it is what looks like two yellow specks, one larger than the other, and you wonder if it could be another set of pentagrams. You wonder if _they_ are supposed to be there. You wonder if you have the guts to fly that far out to check. You stop wondering and turn your back to it. There're still more places to explore, you convince yourself as you fly further out; you can always check it out later.

By this point you're not even surprised anymore when you come across a giant set of letters floating in the space off to the side. You have a bit of fun flying beneath it at an angle to get the full, eerie experience of seeing the thick blocks of letters dangling in space. You can't help but huff with laughter at how much it looks like someone overdid the effects in a 3D movie, it looks like you've found out where they splurged the money after they budget cut the floating pentagrams – which still retain the shape of a pentagram despite the fact that you are looking at them from a completely different angle, it's actually kind of cool if you ignore the whole uncanny valley aspect of it.

You orientate yourself to the front of the letters so that you can read the giant curly script spelling out the word DERSE. You momentarily wonder what it means before realising that it is probably the name of…whatever this place is. It is definitely a place name sign that no one will ever miss, you'll give them that.

Later, you'll curse yourself for what you're about to do then, even though you had no way of knowing at the time. Still, if you suddenly had the ability to time travel, you would definitely go back and tell your past self: DON'T DO IT. DON'T LOOK IN THE VOID.

But you don't have time powers, the idea of time travel itself is just silly. And you do look into the void. And. You. Hear. THEM.

You wish you never woke up.


End file.
